That's bananas!

Here's a random news story... I'm not sure what the police would do in this country if a thief swallowed some expensive jewellery, but it probably wouldn't be this!

Police have force-fed 40 bananas to this particular thief in the hope an expensive necklace would pass through, and stayed up all night "monitoring" him. What a job! And after all that they didn't even have any luck.

""We will have to look for other stronger purgatives now," the yawning police officer added."

:)

aaaarrrrgggghhhhh-Tunes

Here goes for another rant....

I've had it up to here with iTunes! The other day I finally got fed up with organising my music collection myself, so unleashed iTunes and it's automatic stuff. After what felt like watching paint dry trying to sort through all the Unknown Artists and their Unknown Albums, just because iTunes doesn't have the sense to look at file names when there's a blank tag, and having to go through numbering tracks of albums to get them in order (again, because iTunes doesn't think to check the original filename for the number) iTunes has now decided to start making some of my hard drives disappear from Windows Explorer :(

No, it's not magic, it's extrememly annoying as it's happened several times now. Today, just as I first opened it and played a track, iTunes complained that its library had disappeared. Sure enough, the drive with the iTunes library had gone again, taking everything on the same controller card with it, requiring a restart before they decided to come back again. Yes, I realise this may be unrelated, but it's never happened before and iTunes is the obvious thing to blame right now because of all the grief it's given me recently. So in hindsight, keeping my music files orgainsed myself was actually a lot less hassle than iTunes is worth. Grrrr.

Another rant over :)

I think they're being too nice actually....

Yes, this is the news that a school has left a confidential report laying around in the street containing details of several pupils and their educational needs and circumstances. Not only that, they also use rather colourful language in describing them, such as "ding bat", "wally" and saying that one boy's mother was "quite rough".

When I saw which school it was I was actually surprised how nice they had been - I can think of far more accurate things to say about most of the brats who go there. "Quite rough" by Howard standards must be extremely bad! Still, it brightened up my Monday morning anyway :)

'Til death us do part...

Premature death is often a sad thing, especially when it leaves widowers, but in this case it's far from it! Rose and Charles Tombe got married last February, but now the most famous goat in Sudan has died from choking on food. Does this mean he'll have to find another wife?

"After the marriage, [the goat] had a male kid - but "not a human one"" :-)

Vista Folder Protection

There will probably be thousands of blog posts about Vista today, as it has now been released to consumers. It has its pros and cons which I won't go into now, but my big problem with it when i first used it was not being able to access certain folders, such as the Application Data folder in my profile. All you get is an "Access is Denied" error. There are obvious reasons for this, but I still wanted go get in there.

This was fixed by removing the "Deny" ACL entry for "Everyone" for that particular folder. But for anyone who doesn't know how to do this, here's a small program by yours truly that will unprotect folders for you. Development of it will be ongoing in the next few weeks, but it does the job for now, much easier for most people than messing about with folder permissions. Anyway, sales pitch over, comments welcome :)

I've decided i don't like banks

In this day and age of the internet, where masses of information is available at the click of a button, how hard can it be for a simple transaction to appear on your statement the day after you made it, why the 3-day wait? It's not like it takes a while to take the money, as your account is debited immediately.

This particular moan has been brought on by me trying to get tickets this morning for Muse at Wembley stadium. I checked my Egg credit card balance beforehand, and it said -£297. Great, i thought, that gives me £200 to play with before i'm up to my limit. 9am i was there clicking refresh until the tickets went on sale, and immediately got 4 standing tickets.

Then suddenly it dawned on me that i'd filled up with petrol the day before which came to £39. This left only £164 for me to spend, and, fully in line with sod's law, 4 tickets plus booking fees came to £169. The ticket booking system doesn't authorise payment for a few hours, so i couldn't go back and book any more as there's a 4 ticket limit per household. I phoned them and asked them if i could change payment methods but they couldn't do it. I then phoned Egg to try to get my credit limit increased by £10, which seems ridiculous, but they wouldn't allow it as i don't earn enough to even apply for a credit card now. I was doomed!

This story did have a happy ending for me, as an extra date was added at 10:30, and I was able to get 4 more tickets for that and pay for them with a different card. What gets to me is the fact that all my hassle could have been avoided if yesterday's petrol had showed up on my statement. The bloke on the phone could see it there on my account, so why couldn't I?

I don't know all the technical stuff behind what goes on when you make a payment, but surely it could be as simple as: Cardholder buys something --> Card issuer checks available funds and authorises payment --> Balances automagically changed over night and transactions appear the next day.

Grrrrrr. Rant over! :-)

so, that's why they give you free delivery....

What's the longest time you've ever waited for something to be delivered? Anything at all - a kitchen, a car, anything you like. Now imagine my suprise at what turned up today, three and a half years after ordering it - a DVD!

I'd completely forgotten about it, of course. Funny stuff for a friday :-)

Obviously you're going to need proof to believe this - here's a copy of the invoice, and although there's no delivery date, there is an order date, along with the adverts for the latest releases at the bottom. Notice things like Ice Age 2 which isn't released until 23/10/06. Certainly not something which would have been advertised when I ordered it!



Yes, I realise some of you will think i've stuck two halves of two invoices together, but there's no pleasing some people ;-)

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

I know I've needed a reason to blog for a while now, but I didn't think it would come in this form.

Anyhow, R.I.P. Sid.
"...come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine."